Bruce Byfield

A few years ago, Xfce had a reputation as a lightweight desktop that made few concessions to inexperienced users. However, the Xfce 4 series of releases have shown steady improvements in usability, and version 4.6 is no exception. Although Xfce 4.6 has almost no completely new programs or features, it adds dozens of enhancements to […]

Two months after SourceForge’s Linux.com site stopped publishing new stories, the reason has finally been made public: The site has been acquired by the Linux Foundation. As of today, the URL redirects to a welcome page that solicits suggestions from the community about what contents the site should have. The Linux Foundation will administer the […]

When you are a free and open source software (FOSS) supporter, life often seems black and white. You are for user freedom and shared source code, and against proprietary software and companies — especially Microsoft. Depending on your position (more toward open source or toward free software) you might have a few doubts, as well, […]

Over the last year, the KDE 4 releases have suffered frequently hostile receptions. Part of that hostility was due to a widespread failure to understand that the first release was not intended for general use, and therefore was missing some of the features that KDE users took for granted. Another part seems to have been […]

You can count on two things for every Debian release: It will be later than expected, and it will be suitable for every possible level of expertise. Debian 5.0 is no exception. Arriving almost five months later than originally scheduled, Debian 5.0 is not the most cutting-edge GNU/Linux distribution, but, like earlier releases, it is […]

What Microsoft does when it is not attacking free and open source software (FOSS) usually exists in my peripheral vision, if I notice it all. For that reason, I had forgotten about CodePlex, Microsoft’s repository for open source code, until Matt Assay mentioned it a couple of weeks ago in his blog. Quoting a blog […]

KDE on Windows is such a subversive project that it is impossible to resist. Who else except the free and open source software (FOSS) community would take a desktop for Unix-like systems and port it to Windows, co-opting the very operating system that community members love to hate? On second thought, however, the idea is […]

NixOS is not about to challenge Ubuntu or Fedora as a desktop distribution any time soon. But, then, user-friendliness is not its point. Originally developed by Eelco Dolstra as a doctoral project at Utrecht University, and now developed by a small team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, NixOS is designed as a […]

Linus Torvalds may have switched too soon from the KDE 4 desktop because of usability problems. Less than a week after he made his off-hand comments, KDE 4.2 has been released, adding many of the customization settings that Torvalds and others complained were lacking in the KDE 4 series. Customization isn’t the whole story in […]

Just as KDE 4 is poised to prove itself with the user-friendly 4.2 release, the year-long controversy over the changes from the KDE 3 release has ignited again. This time, the spark was a interview comment by Linus Torvalds that he had switched to GNOME and thought that the KDE release had been mis-managed. Torvalds’ […]